Who is Celestolite and What is the Scam?

If you live in london, and are a woman, you likely have seen ads on facebook and instagram lately of various different offers for a Spa/Salon called Celestolite.

Here's my honest review on the place, and some crucial information you need to know.

People, this place is a scam. It has been from day one. I know you think I'm making this stuff up, so if you are willing to go down this road, the least you can do is read through this review before you make the same mistake thousands of women have made over the last three years in London. 

This location has had at least 3 names that we know about over the last few years. 

Oro Gold

Smooth You 

and now.... Celestolite. 

Each time, they essentially abandoned all their obligations, ditching thousands of clients with packages and treatments, they dissolved their old company, rebranded (barely!) and then started from fresh. 

The scam works pretty simple: 

1) Run Aggressive offer via facebook and Instagram. 

Here is 3 current live pages running ads for celestolite, all of them not using the Celestolite name. (ps. click info tab to see the live ads in your country (uk). All with same offers. 

https://www.facebook.com/pg/Golden-Swan-1654396391282798/ads/?country=3&ref=page_internal

https://www.facebook.com/pg/TheBestBeautyTreatments/ads/?country=3&ref=page_internal

https://www.facebook.com/pg/O-Clinic-200093563889676/ads/?ref=page_internal

For fun here are some screenshots of their ads all with different page names: 

They are all slightly different, all lead to the same team who will book you in. All for the same spa. Why they don't use their own name comes down to a story done by Watchdog on their Great Portland Street location back in november where they were visited by undercover journalists while running under smoothyou. So they diversified their ads on multiple pages making it harder to track.

BBC Interview: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/articles/mjLHdQTf8zv9jb0Lbz4rM0/smooth-you

Daily Mail: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-6442823/Skin-clinic-accused-BBC-Watchdog-using-high-pressure-sales-tactics-secure-5-000-deals.html

2) They contact you and invite you for the treatment. They will call you multiple times, always with a sense of urgency. 

3) You make the sad mistake of showing up, get a brief treatment, a "skin test" where they rig the system to always show you are damaged goods, and your skin is awful. 

4) They upsell you with a complete package of products and treatments and offer you multiple payment providers. 

In the past they have used: 

Paybreak (AfforditNow)

Shawbrook

Omnicapital

Duologi

Divido

Now you are likely thinking this can't possibly be true. So here's all the proof you need. 

Smooth You which is the most recent scandal operated in three locations: 

1) 155 Kensington High Street - 

2) 210 Great Portland Street -

3) Dalston Square -

The first one to close was Kensington High Street, sometime in the summer. At first they just transferred existing clients to Great Portland Street. But that became too much since their whole business model relies on signing up new clients. Once you've signed up, they get the full amount of money from the finance company, and you pay monthly payments back to the finance company. The finance company makes money because the clinic/salon pays them a commission, and in return they take on the risk of ensuring you pay them back. (They are lenders and this is typical business model for most banks, and credit lenders). The problem is, when you begin signing up too many people, you also have to service them in order to keep the illusion that you are operating a legitimate Spa. But you have limited amount of space. Which means each person coming for their package treatments is lost revenue for this scam, since it's one person less they potentially can sign up for a package. 

What do you do when your monthly obligations to current customers exceeds the amount of available slots you have? 

Go into administration: Shut the place down, ditch the 3000+ existing clients, after all you already have the money, and leave the mess to the finance companies and the clients to figure out. The company closes, you find a new brand and rinse and repeat. 

Guess which one these guys picked??? BINGO!!! You guessed right! OPTION 3: 

Last month Smooth You went into administration leaving hundreds of clients out to dry owing thousands of pounds to finance companies and zero chance of getting their treatments. See the Trustpilot reviews from the last month: https://www.trustpilot.com/review/smoothyou.co.uk

Here's testimony of their own employee:

Bottom line, you are being robbed. If not today, in the next year. 

You were warned.

ps. We will continue updating this blog with additional information as we find it.